In case there was any question how women’s rights might be impacted by the incoming administration, Donald Trump’s pick of Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, announced Monday, may provide some clarity.
Price, an orthopedic surgeon and six-term Republican congressman from Georgia, has a long history of opposing abortion and reproductive rights. He has voted against allowing any federal funding to go toward abortion for any reason, wants to cut funding for stem cell research, and worked to block access to many common types of birth control. He has also sponsored measures to defund family planning assistance groups that provide abortions, including Planned Parenthood, which he accused of engaging in “barbaric practices.” He twice co-sponsored Right to Life legislation that would give zygotes full legal protection under the Constitution, thus outlawing any type of abortion or emergency contraception.
Vice News
4: Nigeria: 400,000 children at risk of famine
Fati Adamu has not seen three of her six children nor her husband since Boko Haram fighters attacked her hometown in northeast Nigeria in a hail of gunfire.
Two years on, she is among thousands of refugees at the Bakassi camp in Maiduguri, the city worst hit by a seven-year-old conflict that has forced more than two million people to flee their homes.
The United Nations says 400,000 children are now at risk from a famine in the northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe – 75,000 of whom could die from hunger within the next few months.
Aljazeera
3: Public (School) Enemy No. 1: Billionaire Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Pick for Education Secretary
Donald Trump has tapped conservative billionaire Betsy DeVos to serve as Education Secretary. DeVos is the former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and a longtime backer of charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools. In response, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said, “In nominating Devos Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America.” Since 1970, the DeVos family has invested at least $200 million in various right-wing causes. DeVos’s father-in-law is the co-founder of Amway and her brother is Erik Prince, founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater. For more, we speak to former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch, Center for Media and Democracy executive director Lisa Graves, and elected member of the Detroit Board of Education Tawanna Simpson.
Democracy Now
2: This is the most dangerous time for our planet – Stephen Hawking
As a theoretical physicist based in Cambridge, I have lived my life in an extraordinarily privileged bubble. Cambridge is an unusual town, centred around one of the world’s great universities. Within that town, the scientific community that I became part of in my 20s is even more rarefied.
And within that scientific community, the small group of international theoretical physicists with whom I have spent my working life might sometimes be tempted to regard themselves as the pinnacle. In addition to this, with the celebrity that has come with my books, and the isolation imposed by my illness, I feel as though my ivory tower is getting taller.
So the recent apparent rejection of the elites in both America and Britain is surely aimed at me, as much as anyone. Whatever we might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as their next president, there is no doubt in the minds of commentators that this was a cry of anger by people who felt they had been abandoned by their leaders.
The Guardian
1: Can Gen. James Mattis Teach a Draft-Dodging Tax Cheat About War?
President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen retired Marine Gen. James Mattis to be his secretary of defense. His decision percolated out late Thursday afternoon through anonymous sources close to the transition, who spoke with the Washington Post, and will likely be formally announced next week.
Last week, Trump called Mattis “the real deal.” He told the New York Times that while Mattis shares his love of “winning,” the two men disagree about waterboarding and other forms of torture. Mattis, Trump said, has never found torture to be useful. His preferred tools for getting answers are “a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers.”
It isn’t clear whether Mattis, the former head of U.S. Central Command, actually succeeded in changing Trump’s mind regarding torture. Trump insisted that he hadn’t, and that if the American people wanted more torture, he would deliver it. But Mattis did manage to draw a line between his own thinking and that of his prospective boss, far more so than Gen. Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and others who have managed to hitch their sputtering careers to Trump’s butterscotch locomotive.
The Intercept
